Robotics Leadership Academy

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Friday, August 28, 2015

Chapter 8: Hunter lists three key steps for ongoing change: foundation, feedback, and friction. In our FRC team, who sets the foundation? Who provides the feedback and how? Who provides the friction and how?

In the case of robot building, I think the design and fabrication team would set up a foundation. The rest of the team would provide feedback, where there can be improvements to make their own jobs easier. Friction comes from everyone, there will always be some friction; unless we're in a vacuum, which is unlikely. Hopefully, this year we will be mature and handle that friction in a more constructive manner.

Chapter 9: What are the satisfiers that get people to show up to robotics and exert at least minimum effort? What are the specific motivators that push some students to work very hard for the team beyond simply being present?

I think one definite satisfier is the presence of their friends, people often go to simply hang out. A few more could be the challenge, the camaraderie, getting to build something, or escaping their house. A specific motivator could be prospect of acceptance into a top tier college, or cookies work for others.

Chapter 9: How much "hunger for excellence" do you think we have as a team? In your view, are we shooting to be the best or trying to just be mediocre?

We are team stuck in mediocrity. Many of us want to be a great team, but don't know how to get there. Some don't care as much, and tend become distractions for the motivated ones.

Chapter 9: What will you do this year to help us build community in our FRC team?

Avoiding the blame game when things go wrong. Find something for everyone to do, even if you have it's a stretch. Remembering to be patient is difficult, but necessary for a happy community.

Chapter 9: We, which includes you, are the leadership core of the team. This may mean we serve as product owners and scrum masters. However, it means that we serve as caretakers of our team's greatest assets -- our people. What kinds of questions will you ask in conversation with your teammates to enable you to understand their needs and serve them?

What do you need help with? Is there anything you aren't sure about?

Summary

I've learned to keep everyone motivated, be a selfless leader, and always listen to feedback. Never be satisfied with your own performance, and always strive to be better.

Chapter 8: What is the coach's role in developing leadership capacity in the team? A mentor's role? A student's role?

The coach's role is to help us learn to become leaders and to make courses for the team to become better at leading. A mentor's role is to guide the students and help them become the best leaders they can. A student's role is to guide other students and help them learn and build the robot successfully.

Chapter 8: Hunter lists three key steps for ongoing change: foundation, feedback, and friction. In our FRC team, who sets the foundation? Who provides the feedback and how? Who provides the friction and how?

In our FRC team many people set the foundation like our founding students, our coach, and our mentors. Mostly, the students provide feedback by telling other students, or mentors, or even our coach about problems that should be faced and how we need to fix them. Anyone can provide friction by complaining or being upfront about a problem.

Chapter 9: What are the satisfiers that get people to show up to robotics and exert at least minimum effort? What are the specific motivators that push some students to work very hard for the team beyond simply being present?

The satisfiers could be food, fun, or even just hanging out with friends. The motivators are the things like scholarships and even just just having a complete robot that can beat other teams in the tasks it was designed to do.

Chapter 9: How much "hunger for excellence" do you think we have as a team? In your view, are we shooting to be the best or trying to just be mediocre?

I think that we have a good amount of hunger, but we just have a good amount. Nothing too extraordinary we just want to win. I feel like we are just trying to be mediocre, I mean like we try but I feel like we don't go as hard as we can to win.

Chapter 9: What will you do this year to help us build community in our FRC team?

I will try to help anyone who needs it and will do my best to help other sub-teams. I think, that if we all pitch in to other sub-teams we will be able to build a fantastic robot.

Summary:

I learned about how everything is interdependent on each other for learning and for leading. I also learned that we need to become more excited in order to become the best we can be and we have to shoot for the moon.

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Chapter 8: Hunter lists three key steps for ongoing change: foundation, feedback, and friction. In our FRC team, who sets the foundation? Who provides the feedback and how? Who provides the friction and how?

In the past mentors have set the foundation. Hopefully the team leader will set it next time. Last year the feedback was lacking, but the entire team, mentors and students, provided it to each other verbally. Once again the entire team provides friction with our interactions.

Chapter 9: What are the satisfiers that get people to show up to robotics and exert at least minimum effort? What are the specific motivators that push some students to work very hard for the team beyond simply being present?

Some satisfiers are building stuff, solving problems, resolving problems, Ultimate Frisbee breaks, and of course food. Some motivators that I see pushing people is we only have 6 weeks, wanting to win, and enjoying what they are doing.

Chapter 9: How much "hunger for excellence" do you think we have as a team? In your view, are we shooting to be the best or trying to just be mediocre?

As a team I would say we are somewhere in the middle. We have different people who want different things from robotics. Some want to win, some enjoy working, and a few want screw around, but we all want a winning robot. As a team I would say we want the best robot but don't have infrastructure or work environment to do it.

Chapter 9: What will you do this year to help us build community in our FRC team?

I will try to implement Scrum and other methods that should reduce the amount of debating and increase efficiency. One of these methods is testing many versions and modular assembly scrum teams.

*Chapter 9: There is a list of summary bullet points on the last page. Choose one that you think is most relevant to our team and talk about it.

"Find ways to make people's work more challenging, interesting, and rewarding." One of the problems we had last year was not enough people had jobs or could work on something. If we used a scrum board we could have time to test more ideas, we wouldn't have to many people on one project, and all this would happen faster.

Summary: I learned in order to improve yourself and others you must set the standard, get feedback, then provide friction to keep the change going. Also I learned you should make peoples work enjoyable, recognize good performance, and give everyone a useful purpose to fulfill.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Chapter 8: Continuous improvement is back, but this time about you personally. Describe a CI loop that would lead to measurable, lasting improvement in your leadership.
Assert, Inform, Reflect, Adjust. Assert-let people know that I am there as a leader and to help. Inform-tell them what needs to be done and help them along with any tasks. Reflect-once things are finished up ask those I led how things went, where we are, and what I can do better for them as a leader. Fix any mistakes I made leading.

Chapter 9: What are the satisfiers that get people to show up to robotics and exert at least minimum effort? What are the specific motivators that push some students to work very hard for the team beyond simply being present?
For minimum effort we give them something to do and giving them food for showing up. For maximum effort we allow them to get involved in something they enjoy and take pride in doing it well.

Chapter 9: We, which includes you, are the leadership core of the team. This may mean we serve as product owners and scrum masters. However, it means that we serve as caretakers of our team's greatest assets -- our people. What kinds of questions will you ask in conversation with your teammates to enable you to understand their needs and serve them?
One question: what can I do better as a leader?

Chapter 9: How much "hunger for excellence" do you think we have as a team? In your view, are we shooting to be the best or trying to just be mediocre?
We have the hunger down, but it is more for food than excellence. All jokes aside I think we dream of excellence, but we are not all dedicated enough to be excellent. If we want to improve we need people to show more passion and pride in what they do.

Chapter 9: What will you do this year to help us build community in our FRC team?
I will do my best to motivate my teammates to improve in all aspects of our team, from communication to fabrication, everything needs to be improved for us to be successful.

End with a summary of what you learned.
I learned how to apply these strategies into our team. This will allow for us leaders to improve our whole team and become very competitive.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Chapter 8: What is emotional intelligence (EI)? In what ways are you strongest in EI? How do you get EI "smarter"?

Emotional intelligence is essentially all of your interpersonal skills combined. My EI strong point would probably have to be empathy since whenever I'm angry or in an argument with someone I try to see the argument from their perspective and to understand why they are disagreeing or angry.

Chapter 8: What is the coach's role in developing leadership capacity in the team? A mentor's role? A student's role?

The coaches role in developing leadership in a team is to demonstrate good leadership qualities (or at least improvements in them) and encourage students to learn about and develop these qualities. A mentors role is similar to the coaches in that a mentor must demonstrate these qualities for the students as well. A mentor however can help students develop their leadership ability a little more efficiently since there are simply more of them and they can spend more time with the students. A students role is to learn leadership and other skills from the mentors and coach and then to try to implement the leadership tactics.

Chapter 9: What are the satisfiers that get people to show up to robotics and exert at least minimum effort? What are the specific motivators that push some students to work very hard for the team beyond simply being present?

I think one of the main satisfiers of our team is that you get to spend time being social. If our team were to be all work all the time people would be less likely to volunteer to do it. Another satisfier would be the fact that team members get to see the robot in action. I know that on other teams this isn't a given due to transportation issues, but for our team at least it supplies a great goal to work towards. As far as motivators go, personal recognition and a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the task really get people to work harder.

Chapter 9: How much "hunger for excellence" do you think we have as a team? In your view, are we shooting to be the best or trying to just be mediocre?

I think that our team is trying extremely hard to become excellent at everything. We have been inspired by the change in performance from last year and we want to keep improving and make it farther in the competitions. We really are trying to shoot for the best and, although I don't know when, as long as we put that energy to use in the right places we will accomplish a lot. For instance we WILL go to St. Louis this year.

Chapter 9: There is a list of summary bullet points on the last page. Choose one that you think is most relevant to our team and talk about it.

Seek out best practices and implement them- Our team has already begun to implement this goal through this very activity and I believe this is because of its importance to our team. Last year we had a large number of issues pop up due to laziness, inefficiency, lack of communication, and a bunch of other factors. If we implement better practices and really make them work, we should be able to multiply our last years improvement greatly.

Summary

In this final section of the book I learned about the way to encourage people to improve their leadership skills, the difference between satisfiers and motivators, and things such as the reasons to demand excellence. All in all I think that this book had many great insights on how leadership should work and how to become a great leader. In the overall course, I think the book I learned the most from and enjoyed the most was definitely the one on scrum, but I think that all of the books were relevant and useful to what we hope our team will be.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Chapter 4: When is the last time you participated in pairing rather than bringing issues back to the whole group? What conditions and decisions led you to do it?

The most recent time I participated in pairing was actually at my job. One lifeguard who used to work there would always show up late to shifts and, when she was there, would do the bare minimum she could. Whenever there were extra guards on shift and she was out in the chair we would complain about how she never did anything. No one ever talked to her about this and I'm still not sure she even realized there was a problem.

Chapter 4: Four communication styles are aggressive, passive, passive-aggressive, and assertive. What is the ideal form that we should use? What have we primarily used in the past?

The ideal style of communication is assertive since it gets to the point without causing any discomfort or harm to the person on the receiving end. We have primarily used the passive communication style in the past since it is a lot easier to just let things slide and not step on anyone's toes rather than deal with the problems when someone is angered or offended.

Chapter 5: This chapter talks a lot about "empathetic listening". Explain in your own words what the means and why it is so important.

According to Dictionary.com Empathy means "the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. Put Simply to empathize is to try to understand what someone else is feeling; therefore empathetic listening is listening where you are actively trying to understand what they are seeing and where they are coming from based on their point of view. This is extremely important because it is impossible to truly understand why someone is doing or saying something if you have no idea where they are coming form.

Chapter 7: What is the difference between character and personality? Why is it relevant to leadership?

Someones character is the way they deal with things automatically. It is the part of them that doesn't always show when things are going easy, but when a challenge arises it becomes quite clear. Personality on the other hand is just how people behave towards other on an everyday basis. Personality can be influenced by ones character, but people can pretend to have any type of personality. This is relevant to leadership since hard situations often lead to quick and difficult choices and one's character is what determines the choices one makes in those situations.

Chapter 7: Elizabeth said "My older friends are like they were 30 years ago, only more so". As a high school student, what implications does this have for you?

As a high school student who is probably only approaching the 1/4 point on my lifespan (based on the national average being around 80) the overall meaning is that what I do now will have a resounding affect on my future. The choices that I or other students make now will become habits and will eventually develop our character and strength rather good or bad.

Summary

I've learned about the different styles of communication, how leadership is influenced by character, the difference between character and personality, the definition of love(the verb), and a bunch of other things useful to being a servant leader.

Chapter 4: Describe the difference between love, the feelings, and love, the choice.

Love the feeling is a whimsical emotion that takes no commitment. Love the choice takes effort and work. You have to accept nothing is perfect and build up from there.

Chapter 4: Four communication styles are aggressive, passive, passive-aggressive, and assertive. What is the ideal form that we should use? What have we primarily used in the past?

Assertive, because it gets the message through in a timely manner without being attacking or aggressive. We have tended to be passive-aggressive. We might not directly say what we needed done, but simply complained that it wasn't done.

Chapter 5: Imagine that two students are chasing each other with pool noodles at a scrimmage event. What does accountability look like in this situation? Who should know about the event? Who should provide the accountability? Why is it necessary to hold individuals accountable?

Accountability would be in the form of negative consequences, be it a reprimand or having to sit in a corner for five minutes. The leaders of the team should know about the event and though the coach should probably be the one providing accountability. It is a slippery slope once someone is given control over another person, and I doubt a student would be capable of handling it properly. It is necessary to hold them accountable because that type of behavior is unacceptable. It makes the team look immature, they could get in other peoples' way, bump into someone, or anger a stranger.

Chapter 7: Elizabeth said "My older friends are like they were 30 years ago, only more so". As a high school student, what implications does this have for you? OR As a mentor, how have your past choices built good and bad habits in your life?

This pretty much means people stay the same. People travel along the same path as they always have and don't change much. habits you have now will stick with you for the rest of your life.

Chapter 7: Change is usually initiated by friction / discomfort / pain / suffering. If you want to change your habits, where will the discomfort come from that motivates your change?

The discomfort would come from knowing that you aren't being the best person you can be. You recognize your own flaws and realize that that isn't who you want to be, and your flaws are easily erased through simple effort.

Summary

I've learned that leadership is influenced by your habits, character, personality, and by the love you show to your peers. Also, it's important to not be a snide commentator when direct communication is better for the soul, and efficiency.